BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 55 of 60)

April 5, 2007

Saved searches, available by RSS feed, at ShackPrices.com

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via Dustin at RCG, new features at ShackPrices.com:

When you save a shack, you can keep track of price changes, status changes (if they’ve accepted an offer or the house has sold), and if the shack is removed from market or if it sells. The complete history of each saved shack, starting the day you saved it, is under the saved shacks tab. You can sign up for daily or weekly emails of changes OR you can subscribe to an RSS feed. We’ve even set it up so that you can subscribe directly to your Google Homepage, My Yahoo or to a few other online RSS readers (I use Google Homepage for my top 15 feeds, Google Reader for the other 50 or so). It’s easy to save a shack – just click the little star next to it.

These were announced yesterday, in the shadow of the big boot, and, of course, these are features people are bugging Zillow.com to provide. ShackPrices is vastly more innovative than anyone else doing map-based home search, so it will be interesting to see how they hold up in the fray.

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April 4, 2007

Zillow 5 is here, and, whether or not you seize upon its opportunities, it isn’t going away

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A day later, I think it’s all over but the shouting. There have been a small few objections, some earnest, some spurious, but, in the end, none of it matters. Zillow 5 is here, and it isn’t going away. Brian Brady and I have talked about how you might take advantage of the new functionality in Zillow. But take advantage or don’t, Zillow 5 is here.

Last night I explicitly addressed the conjecture that publicizing a home for sale is, colorably, advertising. I argue that it’s a material fact, not a solicitation to buy. But even if MLS systems or the NAR should rule otherwise, this would impact only Realtors. Anyone else could report these facts, picking them off of any one of dozens of Realtors’ IDX systems — to put exactly the right point on the candor behind the complaints. When little vendors see the sole of a big boot right overhead, we expect them to shriek. But their caviling will come to nothing. Zillow 5 is here.

In the same way, worrying about bad behavior that might but so far has not happened seems unlikely to move Zillow.com off its position. There may well be acts of malice, and Zillow will have to respond in a quick and measured way or risk losing all the decent people it is trying to attract. If it fails at this, it fails, but I doubt it’s going to quit the arena in response to so-far unfounded worries. Zillow 5 is here.

If there is a peril to feared from Zillow.com, it is here: This company has gone from a world-shaking AVM to a radical listings platform to a national residential real estate marketplace in fourteen months. This last round of revisions — adding many new pages and vast new capacity — took four months. If this advertising play does not pay off, could it turn itself into a national semi-automated real estate brokerage? You bet. In six months at the outside.

Will that happen? Hide and watch. Would it be a moral wrong if it did? We know exactly what we say to the crybaby union Read more

April 4, 2007

Random observations on the new Zillow.com feature set

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Your profile can include an embedded YouTube video.

Your profile photo is going to be reduced to 66 pixels in width, so if you scale it to that size before uploading, you’ll get marginally better quality. (Or is it 100 pixels tall?)

In general, photo scaling seems pretty fuzzy to me. For your own listings, it’s worth your while to scale to their width (267 pixels?) before you upload. (Or is it 200 pixels tall?)

The text editor for your profile is blog-like except that UTF-8 high order characters are being dumbed down to 7-bit ASCII, so you might as well dumb them down yourself — again to keep quality control.

The Wiki text editor will smart paste, like the ActiveRain editor, but it won’t retain your CSS. That means you’ll probably have to blow in an extra return between paragraphs. I don’t know if you can past in raw HTML, which would be my preference.

How’s business? Zillow.com’s David Gibbons:

Site traffic is definitely up though it’s not as much of a vicious spike as say when the WSJ story suddenly hit in February. It’ll be interesting to see what MSM pickup there is through the rest of the week. Early activity around Q&A and EZ Ads looks great with a fair amount of “testing” going on — I’m impressed by how quickly some questions were answered. EZ Ads in particular is looking surprisingly good. A few advertisers are testing ads in multiple (>10) zip codes. Too early to tell the impact on for sale postings but it looks like a bunch of homes have already been reported for sale.

A bunch from me. I’d love to be able to do this with a tab- or comma-delimited file. Even typing into a form would be faster. If the house is already listed, Zillow can ignore me.

Page loads do not seem to me to be inordinately slow.

 
Further notice: I said: “I’d love to be able to do this with a tab- or comma-delimited file. Even typing into a form would be faster.” In retrospect, this multi-step, manual entry is a passive barrier against the kinds of vandalism Jonathan Read more

April 3, 2007

Planet Zillow.com: Burgeoning Realty.bot grows, potentially, to become a self-sustaining residential real estate eco-system

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the news. We’ll circle back for details and implications.

Zillow.com, the national Realty.bot growing out of the popular automated home valuation service, is releasing a new version of its popular web-based real estate portal tonight. Dubbed Zillow 5, the new functionality comes in three broad categories:

  • Any user of the system — not just homeowners or their real estate agents — will be able to report that a particular home is for sale and at what price. Only owners and/or listing agents will be able to create more elaborate listings for homes for sale.
  • Any user of the site will be able to ask or answer a specific question about a home, whether or not it is listed for sale. The questions and answers will be stored with the record for that home, and each user’s questions, answers and Real Estate Guide (formerly known as the Zillow Wiki) contributions will be recorded on that user’s personal profile page on the system.
  • Agents or other users wishing to promote either themselves or their homes listed for sale will be able to do so through a new “EZ Ads” system. In appearance, the ads will look like a cross between a button ad and a Google AdWords text ad: a headline, two lines of text, an outbound link and an image — a logo or a photo. Unlike AdWords ads, the billing will be pay-per-impression, not pay-per-click. The ads will be sold by the zip-code at a cost of one-penny per impression. Ads targeted at a particular zip-code will rotate at random to exhaust the advertiser’s pre-paid spend over a pre-set span of time.

BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:

BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:

BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.

“With this release, Zillow becomes a community,” said David Gibbons, the company’s Director of Community Relations. That’s true, but it’s somewhat Read more

April 3, 2007

A screen-shot tour of Zillow.com’s new feature set

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Amending this: The site is live with Zillow.com founders Richard Barton and Lloyd Frink as the first Q&A links:

These are screen shots I captured during a teleconference with Zillow.com Directory of Community Relations, David Gibbons. Everything is scaled to fit the weblog column, so the live pages, when they become available will look different.


A Realtor-listed home with the Q&A panel. The listing agent’s contact information is shown at the right.


Detail of the full Q&A panel. The hot links will click through to user profile pages.


A user profile page with phone numbers plus email and web page links, along with links to all user-supplied content.


A home that is not listed for sale.


A home that has been listed for sale by a user other than the owner or listing agent. On the right is a link to that user’s profile page.


EZ Ads as they will appear on each page, three ads to a page, cycling at any page refresh.


The EZ Ads creation template. You have control over what you advertise, how much you spend and how quickly your ad buy is deployed. An ad will consist of a headline, an image, two lines of text and a clickable link to a page within or outside of Zillow.com.


The EZ Ads billing page. There is no automated billing/recurring for now.


The EZ Ads confirmation screen.


EZ Ads stats, very rudimentary for now. Zillow plans to improve upon this in the future.

BloodhoundBlog features extensive coverage of tonight’s announcement from Zillow.com:

BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will also be covering the story at these sites:

BloodhoundBlog has published more about Zillow.com than any other weblog or publication.

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April 3, 2007

Zillow.com’s press release detailing added functionality in new software release

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Zillow.com™ Launches Home Q&A

“Ask Questions, Share Answers”at the heart of numerous new features harnessing knowledge of agents, homeowners and neighbors

Seattle — April 4, 2007 — Real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced the launch of Zillow™ Home Q&A, among other new features aimed at further opening the site up to community contributions. Home Q&A is the ability for anyone to ask questions and share information and insight about more than 70 million U.S. homes.

“The release of Zillow Home Q&A enables anyone to ask any question about any house for the Zillow community to answer,” said Rich Barton, Zillow CEO. “This is the next step in our quest to help make everyone smarter about real estate. A quest that began with publishing Zestimate™ values last year as a starting point to answer the critical question, ‘How much is this home worth?’ Since then, we have enabled homeowners and agents to update home facts, post homes for sale, and set their Make Me Move™ prices. Over half a million people have made these contributions so far, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in helping people get answers to critical real estate questions.”

Visitors to Zillow.com can now “ask a question” or “answer a question” about millions of homes, right on that home’s Zillow Web page. Anyone can rate answers as “helpful” or “not helpful,” and each contribution links back to a user’s profile page — telling visitors, for example, if the question was answered by a local agent or other real estate professional, or if the contributor frequently answers questions within the Zillow community.

“Today, some of the most colorful and important information about homes and real estate is trapped inside the heads of local experts — agents, homeowners and neighbors,” said Lloyd Frink, Zillow president. “By allowing people to freely ask questions and share information online about homes, we hope to unlock, for the community as a whole, a powerful vault of data — such as an agent sharing insight into a neighborhood, or a potential buyer asking the shortest commute route downtown.”

In addition to Home Q&A, other new features announced Read more

March 30, 2007

Soundtrack for my Project Bloodhound life

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

This isn’t real estate related, but since I’m only here as a blogging experiment anyway…

A stunninngly gorgeous and pretty damn smart teenager has found a soundtrack for my Project Bloodhound life. It might be old to the technogeeks here, but it’s new to me, and as there is no accounting for taste, I think it’s fun. Just the thing for tapping your toes during blogsomnia (just close your eyes and listen, the video sucks).

Happy Friday!

March 30, 2007

Skilled Realtor bargain of lifetime

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Skilled Realtor bargain of lifetime

We own 65 Internet domains so far. Of those, 29 are actually hosted on the Internet, sites you can visit with your Web browser. The others are “pointed” at the hosted sites.

If you forget that I work for BloodhoundRealty.com but remember my name, GregSwann.com will take you to our main Web site.

We build custom sites for our higher-priced listings, which accounts for many of the hosted sites. We also have sites for our Weblogs and a site we use to test new versions of our software to make sure it’s ready to deploy.

We are a high-tech real estate brokerage trying to stay ahead of the curve in a high-tech era.

Looking over one shoulder, we compete against traditional Realtors. But looking over the other, the Realty.bots — venture-capital-funded Internet real estate start-ups — make the traditional real estate marketing message harder and harder to deliver.

Is Zillow.com, or another automated valuation method, a useful tool for pricing homes? No, but I have to be prepared to show why, perhaps first overcoming my client’s skepticism.

Is a $199 Internet listing as effective as the full-service marketing package we bring to the table?

My view is that a skilled, experienced Realtor is the bargain of a lifetime. Under one hat, you get pricing and sales expertise, advice about staging and repairs, an expertly executed marketing campaign, a professional negotiator, thoughtful and knowledgeable hand-holding through the escrow process — and more.

Unlike a Realty.bot, your Realtor has actually bought and sold houses — dozens or hundreds of times. With expertise that stretches from little things, like hiring a landscaper, to topics as big as the Internet itself, the professional advice you will get from a good Realtor cannot be matched by canned Realty.bots, no matter how much fun they are to play with.

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March 29, 2007

Late-night random notes . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I finished moving the last of our 29 hosted web sites today, and, so far, I am 98% delighted with the choice me made. The pages just snap, including BloodhoundBlog — which is one fat, data-sodden dog. We have some kind of DNS problem that is intermittently affecting some of our PHP programming. Until now, I have been prepared to write this off to slow or flaky DNS servers out in the world. As of today, I’m thinking we have a problem in-house. By Friday, I’ll have it worked out, and then I expect to be 100% happy.

I’ve had poor Cameron working for two days to solve a problem that may not even be his problem. It is biologically ordained, I think, that fathers and manling sons must quarrel, but Cameron and I spar not about cars or curfews but about software — right now about Unix environment variables. Tonight’s South Park was aimed right at both of us — family togetherness in the form of rude comedy peppered with net.references.

Todd Tarson’s MOCO Real News celebrated its first anniversary yesterday. Todd deserves accolades every which way. The depth of responsibility he feels for other Realtors is without parallel. Because he’s in Arizona, Cathy and I will get to watch him as he becomes one of the Grand Old Men of the Arizona Association of Realtors.

We’re at StarPower tomorrow, so I have a couple of entries set up in advance, to be posted by the scrupulously punctual WordPress bot. Because of all the work I did to keep the foul-mouthed flamers out, quite a few comments are being captured by the moderation bot, or even the spam bot. I won’t be around to deal with those until late in the day. My apologies.

I have many more thoughts on the subject of local real estate weblogging for dollars. Now that I have this hosting issue (mostly) off my plate, I can begin to implement some of them, as well as talk about them.

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March 25, 2007

Skewer you, Jack! You’re the guest of honor at a feeding frenzy

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

FBS Blog:

Think about this: Trulia’s brand is trumping the franchise brand, requiring payments to Trulia, and the franchise brand is trumping the brokers’ and agents’ brands, requiring payments to the franchise. At the same time, the brokers and agents in the field are building the business relationships that form the foundations of the all the brands. They’re doing all the work and they’re having to pay very dearly for lead generation that the web is supposed to be making more efficient. Efficiency for Trulia and Realogy, perhaps, but it doesn’t look very efficient for the brokers and agents.

Check. I think working Realtors need to work without ceasing at developing sources of business that do not require you to give up half of your own deal to cling to the other half. Forget commission relief. There are way too many mouths to be fed upstream.

These business models don’t work in the long run. There’s a fascinating post today on O’Reilly Radar about how Google and others, in their quest to “free” information, need to be careful not to destroy content creation. Here’ a quote from a Google employee, I find highly relevant to MLS today: “”Some think of Google as selling search. Some business types think it sells ads. I think it needs to be in the business of ensuring there’s something to sell ads around.” Yes, exactly. We need to protect content creation, especially the content that’s hard to create, like broad, deep and standard listing information.

Sooner or later, the brokers and agents will figure out that they are paying too much money to Trulia or their franchises for these leads and that they can do it more efficiently through cooperation. This brings me back to the MLS, back to local decisions in the best interest of all competitors. The MLS can and will figure out a way through these challenges. The specific business model for data aggregation and sharing on a broader scale may not exist yet, but the solution exists in a framework of trust allowing MLSs to foster a national non-advertising listing portal controlled by the brokers and Read more

March 23, 2007

Building a better dog house for BloodhoundBlog: One down, dozens to go

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have successfully migrated a hosted domain with a working WordPress weblog to our new host. I’ll do two or three more for practice. If all goes well, tomorrow late we’ll move BloodhoundRealty.com and BloodhoundBlog with it.

For what it’s worth, the preliminaries were all kind of tricky and exacting, but the denouement was almost an anti-climax. Wicked simple, and everything just worked. Could be beginner’s luck, but I have plenty of opportunities to gain experience.

More news when I have a more elaborate plan.

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March 23, 2007

Is Trulia.com in the MLS business? Is REBNY in the dumbed-down listings business? Or will they meet in the middle?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Trulia Blog:

Trulia was selected by the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), New York City’s largest and most prestigious real estate group, to power the first real estate search engine dedicated exclusively to New York City-based listings.

More:

What does this mean?

For consumers, the new search engine will bring together residential property listings from REBNY-member real estate brokerage firms onto a single public Web site for the first time. For the non-New York readers out there…it’s worth noting that Manhattan’s hugely important real estate market does not have a widely used MLS that would allow access to all listings through any single Web site today.

A few dozen ambiguous fields is not an MLS system, but it’s better than what New Yorkers have now. And, who knows, maybe the horse will learn to sing…

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March 23, 2007

Realty.bots will make sellers happy

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Realty.bots will make sellers happy

We talked last week about the move by Realogy Inc. to supply millions of real estate listings from its national brokerage chains to upstart Realty.bots Google Base and Trulia.com. This puts the Realty.bots on the map. Who else is affected?

Sellers should be happy. Realty.bots are really not effective real estate search tools, but they are excellent home shopping sites. Listed homes will be exposed to thousands of users who might not have seen them on Realtor.com or local brokers’ Web sites.

Buyers could be happy. Trulia.com can seem like the Disneyland of real estate: Bright colors, interactive maps, even a Google Earth interface.

But buyers might stop to reflect that a Realty.bot listing is not very different from an exclusive listing. My wife and business partner, Cathleen Collins, was out with a buyer who saw an “exclusive” sign and asked what it meant. Her answer was concise and stingingly accurate: “It means they don’t want you to have representation.”

In fact, Realty.bot listings normally are not exclusive listings. They just look like it. When you click through for information, you are contacting the listing agent directly — or the listing brokerage or brokerage chain. If you proceed with the purchase of that home, you will either be unrepresented or you will be represented by the listing broker. You will not have your own buyer’s agent.

Realtors probably should be unhappy with Realogy’s move. Realty.bots tend to cut buyer’s agents out of the transaction altogether. This won’t save the buyer any money. The listing broker will just get paid double.

But listers also have cause to be unhappy, because the listings Realogy is providing to the Realty.bots will click back to Realogy, not to the listing agent or brokerage. My thinking is that their plan is to sell listers the leads their own listings generate.

It’s a brave new world in real estate. It will be fun to see how this plays out.

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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